BERKELEY — A house fire high in the Berkeley hills Monday afternoon burned aggressively for nearly an hour because firefighters had trouble reaching the remote location, authorities said.

Berkeley fire Chief David Orth said access to the house at 3075 Buena Vista Way — an area on the edge of Tilden Regional Park where the sloping roads narrow and grow thick with vegetation — was a problem.

Dispatchers originally reported the fire was on Parnassus Road, just a minute away up the hill.

But because streets in this area of hills don’t connect in a simple grid-like pattern, crews couldn’t simply drive around the corner, Orth said. They had to backtrack through the narrowly winding roads crowded with cars and houses.

The fire was reported by a neighbor at 5 p.m., and it was under control by 6 p.m., authorities aid.

“This is just a hard area to get into,” he said.

Once firefighters found the house, they had trouble finding its driveway through the dense patch of redwoods, drooping eucalyptus and oak trees that separate the wooden house from the street.

Firefighters had to use an aerial ladder with a water cannon — equipment typically reserved for towering office buildings — to

douse the fire from the street below, Orth said.

Nevertheless, crews were able to contain the two-alarm fire to the house without it spreading through the trees and to neighboring houses.

But the two-story house built into the side of a hill was heavily damaged.

“Flames were lapping around the rooms by the time we got there,” Orth said.

He said the fire is believed to have started in an upper-story room and may have been electrical.

No one was home when flames tore through the three-bedroom house, a modern, shingled structure with open beamed ceilings that neighbor Jean Nagamori said was designed by a well-known architect, although she couldn’t remember the name.

There were no injuries except for a minor shoulder injury to a firefighter, Orth said.

Neighbors say the homeowner was picking up her young son from a private school in Oakland at the time of the fire.

The woman was at the scene but declined to comment.

Neighbors say she is a doctor who lost her husband two years ago to a brain tumor.

Nagamori said the neighborhood — known to locals as the “Nut Hill Society,” because of some of its more eccentric residents — is a mixed blessing.

The winds blow hard up here where a complete view of the San Francisco Bay lies below. And the houses are built close together.

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